Comments/questions from a new user

Dear Team,

I recently started using Citavi, after changing jobs, so I may not be fully up-to-date about all the options. Before, I mainly used Reference Manager, and I have some experience with Endnote. There are several features I appreciate from Citavi, but I seem to be missing some other options, and a few things could be done easier. Some issues that currently come to mind:

1

Enable ordering the citations as follows: first author; year; other authors. Currently, this doesn’t work properly; first, it orders on first author, then on the next author, … and only after that, it will order on year. Not having this option makes it unnecessary hard to find the right citations in larger datasets.

2

Copying between projects;

- At this moment, it’s too cumbersome to copy references from one dataset to another. After having indicated the destination project and whatever other info in advance, a single (mouse)click, e.g. via a button on top of the Citavi-window, should be sufficient. Another option would be to drag the references to the other project by mouse.

- And it would be nice to stay in the original project window, after copying references, so one can move on to the next references that need to be copied into the new project.

- Would it be possible to have a ‘Parent Project’ which contains all references ever collected, and that all new citations that are added to dedicated work-projects also end up in the ‘Parent Project’, to keep a complete dataset of references?

3

Change the way how search-results are displayed. My suggestion, create a temporary project to make it easier to quickly check and work with the search-results. Also, make it possible to copy all search-results (or a selection) to another project by one or two clicks.

4

PDFs;

- Provide an option to link to pdf files on computer instead of uploading the pdfs. For various reasons, I do want to keep a folder with separate pdfs of my collected papers. It seems a waste of space, to have all pdfs copied for all of the projects that I created.

- When I double-click, at the bottom of the Reference field, on the pdf, it seems obvious to me that I want to open that pdf. I find it very annoying that another screen opens, asking about what I want to do, and that this extra screen doesn’t close automatically.

- Use more intuitive names for pdf files, e.g. first author, year, and, if necessary, a, b, c, … After opening several pdfs, it is hard to move from one to the other, as the file names provide no information.

5

Is there no option to add a reference as a chapter of a book, so one can include the chapter info (authors, title, pages, … and book info (editors, title, year, publisher, …)?

Kind regards,

Sebastiaan